Author: R Miller
Publisher: University Press of Kentucky
ISBN: 0813181690
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 128
Book Description
For Black writers, what is tradition? What does it mean to them that Western humanism has excluded Black culture? Seven noted Black writers and critics take up these and other questions in this collection of original essays, attempting to redefine humanism from a Black perspective, to free it from ethnocentrism, and to enlarge its cultural base. Contributors: Richard K. Barksdale, Alice Childress, Chester J. Fontenot, Michael S. Harper, Trudier Harris, George E. Kent, R. Baxter Miller
Black American Literature and Humanism
Author: R Miller
Publisher: University Press of Kentucky
ISBN: 0813181690
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 128
Book Description
For Black writers, what is tradition? What does it mean to them that Western humanism has excluded Black culture? Seven noted Black writers and critics take up these and other questions in this collection of original essays, attempting to redefine humanism from a Black perspective, to free it from ethnocentrism, and to enlarge its cultural base. Contributors: Richard K. Barksdale, Alice Childress, Chester J. Fontenot, Michael S. Harper, Trudier Harris, George E. Kent, R. Baxter Miller
Publisher: University Press of Kentucky
ISBN: 0813181690
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 128
Book Description
For Black writers, what is tradition? What does it mean to them that Western humanism has excluded Black culture? Seven noted Black writers and critics take up these and other questions in this collection of original essays, attempting to redefine humanism from a Black perspective, to free it from ethnocentrism, and to enlarge its cultural base. Contributors: Richard K. Barksdale, Alice Childress, Chester J. Fontenot, Michael S. Harper, Trudier Harris, George E. Kent, R. Baxter Miller
Race Matters, Animal Matters
Author: Lindgren Johnson
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1317356446
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 313
Book Description
Race Matters, Animal Matters challenges one of the grand narratives of African American studies: that African Americans rejected racist associations of blackness and animality through a disassociation from animality. Analyzing canonical texts written by Frederick Douglass, Charles Chesnutt, Ida B. Wells, and James Weldon Johnson alongside slaughterhouse lithographs, hunting photography, and sheep “husbandry” manuals, Lindgren Johnson argues instead for a critical African American tradition that at pivotal moments reconsiders and recuperates discourses of animality weaponized against both African Americans and animals. Johnson articulates a theory of “fugitive humanism” in which these texts fl ee both white and human exceptionalism, even as they move within and seek out a (revised) humanist space. The focus, for example, is not on how African Americans shake off animal associations in demanding recognition of their humanity, but on how they hold fast to animality and animals in making such a move, revising “the human” itself as they go and undermining the binaries that helped to produce racial and animal injustices. Fugitive humanism reveals how an interspecies ethics develops in these African American responses to violent dehumanization. Illuminating those moments in which the African American canon exceeds human exceptionalism, Race Matters, Animal Matters ultimately shows how these black engagements with animals and animality are not subsequent to efforts for racial justice — a mere extension of the abolitionist or antilynching movements— but, to the contrary, are integral to those efforts. This black- authored temporality challenges widely accepted humanist approaches to the relationship between racial and animal justice as it anticipates and even critiques the valuable insights that animal studies and posthumanism have to offer in our current moment.
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1317356446
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 313
Book Description
Race Matters, Animal Matters challenges one of the grand narratives of African American studies: that African Americans rejected racist associations of blackness and animality through a disassociation from animality. Analyzing canonical texts written by Frederick Douglass, Charles Chesnutt, Ida B. Wells, and James Weldon Johnson alongside slaughterhouse lithographs, hunting photography, and sheep “husbandry” manuals, Lindgren Johnson argues instead for a critical African American tradition that at pivotal moments reconsiders and recuperates discourses of animality weaponized against both African Americans and animals. Johnson articulates a theory of “fugitive humanism” in which these texts fl ee both white and human exceptionalism, even as they move within and seek out a (revised) humanist space. The focus, for example, is not on how African Americans shake off animal associations in demanding recognition of their humanity, but on how they hold fast to animality and animals in making such a move, revising “the human” itself as they go and undermining the binaries that helped to produce racial and animal injustices. Fugitive humanism reveals how an interspecies ethics develops in these African American responses to violent dehumanization. Illuminating those moments in which the African American canon exceeds human exceptionalism, Race Matters, Animal Matters ultimately shows how these black engagements with animals and animality are not subsequent to efforts for racial justice — a mere extension of the abolitionist or antilynching movements— but, to the contrary, are integral to those efforts. This black- authored temporality challenges widely accepted humanist approaches to the relationship between racial and animal justice as it anticipates and even critiques the valuable insights that animal studies and posthumanism have to offer in our current moment.
The Strangers Book
Author: Lloyd Pratt
Publisher: University of Pennsylvania Press
ISBN: 081224768X
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 200
Book Description
The Strangers Book explores how various nineteenth-century African American writers radically reframed the terms of humanism by redefining what it meant to be a stranger. Rejecting the idea that humans have easy access to a common reserve of experiences and emotions, they countered the notion that a person can use a supposed knowledge of human nature to claim full understanding of any other person's life. Instead they posited that being a stranger, unknown and unknowable, was an essential part of the human condition. Affirming the unknown and unknowable differences between people, as individuals and in groups, laid the groundwork for an ethical and democratic society in which all persons could find a place. If everyone is a stranger, then no individual or class can lay claim to the characteristics that define who gets to be a human in political and public arenas. Lloyd Pratt focuses on nineteenth-century African American writing and publishing venues and practices such as the Colored National Convention movement and literary societies in Nantucket and New Orleans. Examining the writing of Frederick Douglass in tandem with that of the francophone free men of color who published the first anthology of African American poetry in 1845, he contends these authors were never interested in petitioning whites for sympathy or for recognition of their humanity. Instead, they presented a moral imperative to develop practices of stranger humanism in order to forge personal and political connections based on mutually acknowledged and always evolving differences.
Publisher: University of Pennsylvania Press
ISBN: 081224768X
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 200
Book Description
The Strangers Book explores how various nineteenth-century African American writers radically reframed the terms of humanism by redefining what it meant to be a stranger. Rejecting the idea that humans have easy access to a common reserve of experiences and emotions, they countered the notion that a person can use a supposed knowledge of human nature to claim full understanding of any other person's life. Instead they posited that being a stranger, unknown and unknowable, was an essential part of the human condition. Affirming the unknown and unknowable differences between people, as individuals and in groups, laid the groundwork for an ethical and democratic society in which all persons could find a place. If everyone is a stranger, then no individual or class can lay claim to the characteristics that define who gets to be a human in political and public arenas. Lloyd Pratt focuses on nineteenth-century African American writing and publishing venues and practices such as the Colored National Convention movement and literary societies in Nantucket and New Orleans. Examining the writing of Frederick Douglass in tandem with that of the francophone free men of color who published the first anthology of African American poetry in 1845, he contends these authors were never interested in petitioning whites for sympathy or for recognition of their humanity. Instead, they presented a moral imperative to develop practices of stranger humanism in order to forge personal and political connections based on mutually acknowledged and always evolving differences.
Black Literature and Humanism in Latin America
Author: Richard L. Jackson
Publisher: University of Georgia Press
ISBN: 0820333123
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 190
Book Description
In Black Literature and Humanism in Latin America, Richard L. Jackson explores literary Americanism through writings of black Hispanic authors such as Carlos Guillermo Wilson, Quince Duncan, and Nelson Estupiñán Bass that in many ways provide a microcosm for the larger literature. Jackson traces the roots of Afro-Hispanic literature from the early twentieth-century Afrocriollo movement--the Harlem Renaissance of Latin America--to the fiction and criticism of black Latin Americans today. Black humanism arose from Afro-Hispanics' self-discovery of their own humanity and the realization that over the years they had become not only defenders of threatened cultures but also symbolic guardians of humanity. This humanist tradition had enabled writers such as Manuel Zapata Olivella to write of a Latin America "from below" the slave-ship deck and "from inside" the mind of Africa. Though many writers have adopted black literary models in their quest for a "poetry of sources, of fundamental human values," Jackson demonstrates that literature about blacks by blacks themselves is clearly separate from, yet instrumental to, these other works. Relating the vision of Latin American blacks not only to other Latin American writers but also to North American literary critics such as Eugene Goodheart and John Gardner, Jackson stresses the universal power of resisting oppression and injustice through the language of humanism.
Publisher: University of Georgia Press
ISBN: 0820333123
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 190
Book Description
In Black Literature and Humanism in Latin America, Richard L. Jackson explores literary Americanism through writings of black Hispanic authors such as Carlos Guillermo Wilson, Quince Duncan, and Nelson Estupiñán Bass that in many ways provide a microcosm for the larger literature. Jackson traces the roots of Afro-Hispanic literature from the early twentieth-century Afrocriollo movement--the Harlem Renaissance of Latin America--to the fiction and criticism of black Latin Americans today. Black humanism arose from Afro-Hispanics' self-discovery of their own humanity and the realization that over the years they had become not only defenders of threatened cultures but also symbolic guardians of humanity. This humanist tradition had enabled writers such as Manuel Zapata Olivella to write of a Latin America "from below" the slave-ship deck and "from inside" the mind of Africa. Though many writers have adopted black literary models in their quest for a "poetry of sources, of fundamental human values," Jackson demonstrates that literature about blacks by blacks themselves is clearly separate from, yet instrumental to, these other works. Relating the vision of Latin American blacks not only to other Latin American writers but also to North American literary critics such as Eugene Goodheart and John Gardner, Jackson stresses the universal power of resisting oppression and injustice through the language of humanism.
Black Writers and Latin America
Author: Richard L. Jackson
Publisher: Washington, DC : Howard University Press
ISBN:
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 248
Book Description
In this study, the author begins by examining the influence of Africa and Spain upon the literatures of African Americans and Latin Americans. He explores the reciprocal exchange of influences among artists of African descent in the United States and in Latin America--from established writers to a new generation of writers, including women.
Publisher: Washington, DC : Howard University Press
ISBN:
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 248
Book Description
In this study, the author begins by examining the influence of Africa and Spain upon the literatures of African Americans and Latin Americans. He explores the reciprocal exchange of influences among artists of African descent in the United States and in Latin America--from established writers to a new generation of writers, including women.
Archives of Flesh
Author: Robert Reid-Pharr
Publisher: NYU Press
ISBN: 1479843628
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 271
Book Description
Enlists the principles of post-humanist critique in order to investigate decades of intimate dialogues between African American and Spanish intellectuals In Archives of Flesh, Robert Reid-Pharr reveals the deep history of intellectual engagement between African America and Spain. Opening a fascinating window onto black and anti-Fascist intellectual life from 1898 through the mid-1950s, Reid-Pharr argues that key institutions of Western Humanism, including American colleges and universities, developed in intimate relation to slavery, colonization, and white supremacy. This retreat to rigidly established philosophical and critical traditions can never fully address—or even fully recognize—the deep-seated hostility to black subjectivity underlying the humanist ideal of a transcendent Manhood. Calling for a specifically anti-white supremacist reexamination of the archives of black subjectivity and resistance, Reid-Pharr enlists the principles of post-humanist critique in order to investigate decades of intimate dialogues between African American and Spanish intellectuals, including Salaria Kea, Federico Garcia Lorca, Nella Larsen, Langston Hughes, Richard Wright, Chester Himes, Lynn Nottage, and Pablo Picasso. In the process Reid-Pharr takes up the “African American Spanish Archive” in order to resist the anti-corporeal, anti-black, anti-human biases that stand at the heart of Western Humanism.
Publisher: NYU Press
ISBN: 1479843628
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 271
Book Description
Enlists the principles of post-humanist critique in order to investigate decades of intimate dialogues between African American and Spanish intellectuals In Archives of Flesh, Robert Reid-Pharr reveals the deep history of intellectual engagement between African America and Spain. Opening a fascinating window onto black and anti-Fascist intellectual life from 1898 through the mid-1950s, Reid-Pharr argues that key institutions of Western Humanism, including American colleges and universities, developed in intimate relation to slavery, colonization, and white supremacy. This retreat to rigidly established philosophical and critical traditions can never fully address—or even fully recognize—the deep-seated hostility to black subjectivity underlying the humanist ideal of a transcendent Manhood. Calling for a specifically anti-white supremacist reexamination of the archives of black subjectivity and resistance, Reid-Pharr enlists the principles of post-humanist critique in order to investigate decades of intimate dialogues between African American and Spanish intellectuals, including Salaria Kea, Federico Garcia Lorca, Nella Larsen, Langston Hughes, Richard Wright, Chester Himes, Lynn Nottage, and Pablo Picasso. In the process Reid-Pharr takes up the “African American Spanish Archive” in order to resist the anti-corporeal, anti-black, anti-human biases that stand at the heart of Western Humanism.
Race Sounds
Author: Nicole Brittingham Furlonge
Publisher: University of Iowa Press
ISBN: 1609385616
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 183
Book Description
Forging new ideas about the relationship between race and sound, Furlonge explores how black artists--including well-known figures such as writers Ralph Ellison and Zora Neale Hurston, and singers Bettye LaVette and Aretha Franklin, among others--imagine listening. Drawing from a multimedia archive, Furlonge examines how many of the texts call on readers to "listen in print." In the process, she gives us a new way to read and interpret these canonical, aurally inflected texts, and demonstrates how listening allows us to engage with the sonic lives of difference as readers, thinkers, and citizens.
Publisher: University of Iowa Press
ISBN: 1609385616
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 183
Book Description
Forging new ideas about the relationship between race and sound, Furlonge explores how black artists--including well-known figures such as writers Ralph Ellison and Zora Neale Hurston, and singers Bettye LaVette and Aretha Franklin, among others--imagine listening. Drawing from a multimedia archive, Furlonge examines how many of the texts call on readers to "listen in print." In the process, she gives us a new way to read and interpret these canonical, aurally inflected texts, and demonstrates how listening allows us to engage with the sonic lives of difference as readers, thinkers, and citizens.
Cross-cultural Visions in African American Modernism
Author: Yoshinobu Hakutani
Publisher: Ohio State University Press
ISBN: 0814210309
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 262
Book Description
Yoshinobu Hakutani traces the development of African American modernism, which initially gathered momentum with Richard Wright's literary manifesto "Blueprint for Negro Writing" in 1937. Hakutani dissects and discusses the cross-cultural influences on the then-burgeoning discipline in three stages: American dialogues, European and African cultural visions, and Asian and African American cross-cultural visions. In writing Black Boy, the centerpiece of the Chicago Renaissance, Wright was inspired by Theodore Dreiser. Because the European and African cultural visions that Wright, Ralph Ellison, Alice Walker, and Toni Morrison acquired were buttressed by the universal humanism that is common to all cultures, this ideology is shown to transcend the problems of society. Fascinated by Eastern thought and art, Wright, Walker, Sonia Sanchez, and James Emanuel wrote highly accomplished poetry and prose. Like Ezra Pound, Wright was drawn to classic haiku, as reflected in the 4,000 haiku he wrote at the end of his life. As W. B. Yeats's symbolism was influenced by his cross-cultural visions of noh theatre and Irish folklore, so is James Emanuel's jazz haiku energized by his cross-cultural rhythms of Japanese poetry and African American music. The book demonstrates some of the most visible cultural exchanges in modern and postmodern African American literature. Such a study can be extended to other contemporary African American writers whose works also thrive on their cross-cultural visions, such as Amiri Baraka, Ishmael Reed, Charles Johnson, and haiku poet Lenard Moore.
Publisher: Ohio State University Press
ISBN: 0814210309
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 262
Book Description
Yoshinobu Hakutani traces the development of African American modernism, which initially gathered momentum with Richard Wright's literary manifesto "Blueprint for Negro Writing" in 1937. Hakutani dissects and discusses the cross-cultural influences on the then-burgeoning discipline in three stages: American dialogues, European and African cultural visions, and Asian and African American cross-cultural visions. In writing Black Boy, the centerpiece of the Chicago Renaissance, Wright was inspired by Theodore Dreiser. Because the European and African cultural visions that Wright, Ralph Ellison, Alice Walker, and Toni Morrison acquired were buttressed by the universal humanism that is common to all cultures, this ideology is shown to transcend the problems of society. Fascinated by Eastern thought and art, Wright, Walker, Sonia Sanchez, and James Emanuel wrote highly accomplished poetry and prose. Like Ezra Pound, Wright was drawn to classic haiku, as reflected in the 4,000 haiku he wrote at the end of his life. As W. B. Yeats's symbolism was influenced by his cross-cultural visions of noh theatre and Irish folklore, so is James Emanuel's jazz haiku energized by his cross-cultural rhythms of Japanese poetry and African American music. The book demonstrates some of the most visible cultural exchanges in modern and postmodern African American literature. Such a study can be extended to other contemporary African American writers whose works also thrive on their cross-cultural visions, such as Amiri Baraka, Ishmael Reed, Charles Johnson, and haiku poet Lenard Moore.
Black Bodies and Transhuman Realities
Author: Melvin G. Hill
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield
ISBN: 1498583814
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 237
Book Description
Black Bodies and Transhuman Realities: Scientifically Modifying the Black Body in Posthuman Literature and Culture makes a series of valuable contributions to ongoing dialogues surrounding posthuman blackness and Afro-transhumanism. The collection explores the Black body (self) in the context of transhuman realities from a variety of literary and artistic perspectives. These points of view convey the cultural, political, social, and historical implications that frame the space of Black embodiment, functioning as sites of potentiality and pointing toward the possibility of a transcendental Black subjectivity. In this book, many questions concerning the transformation of the Black body are presented as parallels to philosophical and religious inquiries that have traditionally been addressed from a hegemonic viewpoint. The chapters demonstrate how literature, based on its historical and social contexts, contributes to broader thought about Black transcendence of subjectivity in a posthuman framework, exploring interpretations of the “old” and visions of the “new” human.
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield
ISBN: 1498583814
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 237
Book Description
Black Bodies and Transhuman Realities: Scientifically Modifying the Black Body in Posthuman Literature and Culture makes a series of valuable contributions to ongoing dialogues surrounding posthuman blackness and Afro-transhumanism. The collection explores the Black body (self) in the context of transhuman realities from a variety of literary and artistic perspectives. These points of view convey the cultural, political, social, and historical implications that frame the space of Black embodiment, functioning as sites of potentiality and pointing toward the possibility of a transcendental Black subjectivity. In this book, many questions concerning the transformation of the Black body are presented as parallels to philosophical and religious inquiries that have traditionally been addressed from a hegemonic viewpoint. The chapters demonstrate how literature, based on its historical and social contexts, contributes to broader thought about Black transcendence of subjectivity in a posthuman framework, exploring interpretations of the “old” and visions of the “new” human.
Toni Morrison’s Art. A Humanistic Exploration of The Bluest Eye and Beloved
Author: Sumedha Bhandari
Publisher: Anchor Academic Publishing
ISBN: 3960671180
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 101
Book Description
Toni Morrison, the eighth American to receive the Nobel Prize in Literature, is perhaps the most formally sophisticated novelist in the history of African-American literature. Astutely, she describes aspects of human lives and, unlike many other writers, reveals the hope and beauty that underlines the worlds ugliness. Her artistic excellence lies in achieving a perfect balance between black literature and writing abouth the universally truth. Although firmly grounded in the cultural heritage and social concerns of black Americans, her work transcends narrowly prescribed conceptions of ethnic literature, exhibiting universal mythical patterns and overtones. Her novels, thus, mourn on universal concerns. The endeavor in this study is to scrutinize the unspoken lexis of Toni Morrison’s works and to unveil the layers of humanistic concerns that provide denotations to her words. Earlier studies on this writer have concentrated on adjudging her as a writer addressing problems of black people. However, this book tries to extend this notion to encompass the problems of whole human community by assimilating blacks in the general drama of life. Before dyeing the strings of Morrison’s novels with the colour of humanist concerns, this book delineates the term ‘Humanism’ from which these humanistic concerns arise.
Publisher: Anchor Academic Publishing
ISBN: 3960671180
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 101
Book Description
Toni Morrison, the eighth American to receive the Nobel Prize in Literature, is perhaps the most formally sophisticated novelist in the history of African-American literature. Astutely, she describes aspects of human lives and, unlike many other writers, reveals the hope and beauty that underlines the worlds ugliness. Her artistic excellence lies in achieving a perfect balance between black literature and writing abouth the universally truth. Although firmly grounded in the cultural heritage and social concerns of black Americans, her work transcends narrowly prescribed conceptions of ethnic literature, exhibiting universal mythical patterns and overtones. Her novels, thus, mourn on universal concerns. The endeavor in this study is to scrutinize the unspoken lexis of Toni Morrison’s works and to unveil the layers of humanistic concerns that provide denotations to her words. Earlier studies on this writer have concentrated on adjudging her as a writer addressing problems of black people. However, this book tries to extend this notion to encompass the problems of whole human community by assimilating blacks in the general drama of life. Before dyeing the strings of Morrison’s novels with the colour of humanist concerns, this book delineates the term ‘Humanism’ from which these humanistic concerns arise.